Intelligent design/creationism

Category archives for Intelligent design/creationism

Deepak Chopra isn’t very happy right now. In fact, he appears downright pissed off right now, particularly at skeptics, so much so that he’s issued a hilariously fatuous “challenge” to James Randi (a.k.a.) The Amazing Randi on You Tube entitled Deepak Chopra’s One Million Dollar Challenge to Skeptics: Yes, apparently with The Amazing Meeting (a.k.a.…

Instead of the usual logorrheic (usually) well-thought out Insolence you’ve come to expect every day, Instead, you’ll hvae an announcement and a couple of random thoughts. The reasons are multiple. First, today’s a travel day. I’m heading off to Nashville to attend and speak at CSICon. My topic? What do you think it will be?…

As the last full weekday of my vacation passes, I thought about whether I’d bother to post anything or not, given that I happen to be traveling. After yesterday’s post, the subject of which was profoundly depressing to me because I hate it when quacks take cynical advantage of a grieving family to promote their…

And now for something completely different. Except that it isn’t really. I say that it isn’t really different because, although this post will seem to be about politics, in reality it will be about a common topic on this blog: Anti-science. And where is this anti-science? Sadly, it’s in the platform of a major party…

If there’s one thing shared in common among nearly all advocates of pseudoscience, it is the belief that they know The Truth. More importantly, they know The Truth, and The Powers That Be don’t want you to know The Truth and will do almost anything to makes sure that The Truth stays secret. Think about…

One of the most inaptly named groups I’ve ever seen is called Thinking Moms’ Revolution (henceforth abbreviated as TMR). Given the reality of what TMR really is, the word “thinking” applied to TMR is, as they say, so wrong it’s not even wrong. As for a “revolution,” what TMR really represents is nothing revolutionary at…

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years looking at cranks, examining crank science (i.e., pseudoscience), and trying to figure out how to inoculate people against crankery. Because I’m a physician, I tend to do it mostly in the realm of medicine by critically examining “alternative” medical claims and discussing the scientific basis of…

Remember Michael Egnor? I bet many of you do. If you were reading this blog three or four years ago, Dr. Egnor was a fairly regular target topic of my excretions of not-so-Respectful Insolence. The reason for that was, at the time, I was quite annoyed that a fellow surgeon could so regularly lay down…

Grant time again! Since today–yes, today!–is the deadline for a rather big grant I’m writing (not quite R01 level, but a respectable three year project if I can get it), I was up until the wee hours of the morning trying to put this sucker to bed. Being the ever-benevolent blogger, though, far be it…

After you’ve been blogging as long as I have, you inevitably wind up on a lot of mailing lists. Publicity companies, for instance, long ago discovered that getting a buzz going in the blogosphere is every bit as important as trying to get coverage from the “traditional” media. If you’re as fortunate as I’ve been…

One of the great things about having declared Vaccine Awareness Week is that it gives me a convenient excuse to revisit topics and blog posts that I had meant to address but that somehow didn’t make the cut the first time around. This is the sort of thing that happens fairly frequently in blogging, where…

I’ve been a critic of Arianna Huffington’s massive group blog, The Huffington Post, since three weeks after it first blighted the blogosphere. That’s when I first noticed that the “health” section (such as it is) of HuffPo had already become a wretched hive of scum and anti-vaccine quackery, something I began documenting again and again…

I don’t know if I need to get out the infamous paper bag or–even worse–the Doctor Doom mask out yet. As you may recall (if you are a long time reader, anyway) is that the mind-numbing stupidity of certain MDs has driven me to want to hide my face in utter shame at the embarrassment…

If there’s one thing that has irritated me (one might even say, irritated me enough to start this blog), it’s ideology or religion trumping science. Perhaps the most annoying form of this disease is the tendency of the right wing whackosphere to do everything and anything it can to distort and twist science to agree…

It’s rare that I encounter a bit of nonsense that allows me to deploy two of my favorite rhetorical devices. First, it lets me pull out one of my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies, in which the immortal line, “Help! Help! I’m being repressed!” was first uttered. Second, it lets me repeat…

Since I happen to have fallen into the topic of anthropogenic global warming, before I move back to medical topics I might as well have a little fun. Certainly, I could use some, given that I just wrote two posts in which I felt forced to criticize someone whom I admire greatly. Besides, it’s been…

A couple of years ago, fellow ScienceBlogger Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism Blog coined a most excellent term to describe all manners of pseuodscience, quackery, and crankery. The term, “crank magnetism,” describes the tendency of cranks not to mind it when they see crankery in others. More specifically, it describes how cranks of one variety…

I knew it! I knew there had to be an explanation that young earth creationists could come up with for all that evidence in support of evolution: (WARNING: Borderline NSFW, depending on your job. Definitely offensive to fundamentalists.) It’s so obvious. Why didn’t I think of it before?

As I mentioned on Friday, I’m in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I’ll be until Wednesday afternoon, and may not be able to post anything new before Thursday afternoon or Friday. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me…

I may have been a bit hard on Richard Dawkins lately, but, if he believed in saints, Dawkins would deserve sainthood for keeping his cool in the face of so much concentrated idiocy coming from Bill O’Reilly: A couple of lovely O’Reilly quotes: “I’m throwing in with Jesus because you guys can’t tell us how…

Seventy years ago today, the massed armies of the Third Reich poured across the Polish border, marking the official start of World War II. It would require nearly six years, millions of deaths, and the combined might of the Soviet Union, United States, Great Britain, and numerous other nations to bring the war to an…

It was just a high school marching band, like so many other high school bands in this country, a band that no one outside of the area of Sedalia, Missouri would be likely to have heard of, were it not for a breathtakingly stupid action by its school superintendent. You see, the band had an…

Last week, I expressed my surprise and dismay that the Atheist Alliance International chose Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award. I was dismayed because Maher has championed pseudoscience, including dangerous antivaccine nonsense, germ theory denialism complete with repeating myths about Louis Pasteur supposedly recanting on his deathbed, a hostility towards “Western medicine” and an…

Well, I’m back. After my trip to TAM7, I’m back in the real world, jet-lagged and tired. So it may take me a while–hopefully only a little while–to get back to my usual prolific output, and there will be something later today. In the meantime, just let me say I really, really wish I had…

I’ve just returned from Las Vegas after having attended The Amazing Meeting.. Believe it or not, I was even on a panel! While I’m gone, However, my flight was scheduled to arrive very late Sunday night, and I’m still recovering. Consequently, for one more day I’ll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of…